CRediT Author Statement: 14 Roles + Samples

A CRediT author statement — often labelled a CRediT authorship contribution statement in a journal’s own submission instructions — is a structured list, attached to a published paper, that records which of the 14 standardised Contributor Roles Taxonomy roles each author performed. This page gives four ready-to-adapt sample statements — standard, lead/equal/supporting qualifiers, equal/co-first-author, and non-author acknowledgment — plus how Elsevier and other publishers actually collect them.

The illustrative author names below (Zhang San, Priya Patel, Erin Wright, Adam Lloyd, Maria García-López) are the same placeholder roster used elsewhere on this site — not a real publication. “Zhang San” is also the placeholder name used in Elsevier’s own published CRediT documentation, so it doubles as a realistic stand-in for the kind of name you’ll see in publisher-provided examples.

The 14 CRediT roles, defined

Every sample on this page draws only from this fixed list of 14 roles that ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022 defines. There is no requirement to use all 14 in a given statement — assign only the roles that actually happened and skip the rest, and don’t invent a role name that isn’t on this list.

Role	Definition
Conceptualization	Ideas; formulation or evolution of overarching research goals and aims.
Methodology	Development or design of methodology; creation of models.
Software	Programming, software development; designing computer programs; implementation of the computer code and supporting algorithms; testing of existing code components.
Data curation	Management activities to annotate (produce metadata), scrub data and maintain research data for initial use and later re-use.
Formal analysis	Application of statistical, mathematical, computational, or other formal techniques to analyse or synthesise study data.
Investigation	Conducting a research and investigation process, specifically performing the experiments, or data/evidence collection.
Resources	Provision of study materials, reagents, materials, patients, laboratory samples, animals, instrumentation, computing resources, or other analysis tools.
Validation	Verification, whether as part of the activity or separate, of the overall replication/reproducibility of results/experiments and other research outputs.
Visualization	Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work, specifically visualization/data presentation.
Writing – original draft	Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work, specifically writing the initial draft (including substantive translation).
Writing – review & editing	Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work by those from the original research group, specifically critical review, commentary or revision.
Funding acquisition	Acquisition of the financial support for the project leading to this publication.
Project administration	Management and coordination responsibility for the research activity planning and execution.
Supervision	Oversight and leadership responsibility for the research activity planning and execution, including mentorship external to the core team.

Full definitions with canonical role identifiers are on the CRediT roles index; each role also has its own dedicated page, for example Conceptualization.

CRediT authorship contribution statement

"CRediT authorship contribution statement," "CRediT author statement," "author credit statement" and "authorship contribution statement" all refer to the same thing: the structured, role-by-role list defined by ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022 that this page shows how to write. There is no separate format or stricter standard behind the longer phrasing — publishers and style guides simply vary in which of these terms their own instructions use, but the underlying object is identical: byline names, each paired with one or more of the 14 roles above. If a journal’s submission system or author guidelines use a different one of these phrases than the search that brought you here, you’re still filling in the same structure shown in the four samples below.

Four sample statements you can adapt

1. Standard statement, no qualifiers

This is the format most journals accept by default, and the one closest to what publishers like Elsevier show in their own author guidance: authors listed in byline order, each followed by the roles they performed, no lead/equal/supporting qualifier attached.

Zhang San: Conceptualization, Methodology, Software.
Priya Patel: Data curation, Writing – original draft.
Erin Wright: Visualization, Investigation.
Adam Lloyd: Supervision, Validation.
Maria García-López: Writing – review & editing, Funding acquisition.

A published statement in this style doesn’t need every role used, and no author needs more than one or two — assign only what actually happened. Full definitions for each role are on the roles index.

2. Statement with lead / equal / supporting qualifiers

The optional degree-of-contribution qualifier is part of the ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022 standard itself, not a publisher add-on. Use it when it is genuinely informative — for example, when two people worked on the same role but at different levels of responsibility:

Zhang San: Conceptualization (lead), Software, Formal analysis (supporting).
Priya Patel: Data curation (lead), Writing – original draft (equal).
Erin Wright: Writing – original draft (equal), Investigation.
Adam Lloyd: Supervision (lead), Project administration.

In JATS XML this is encoded as a specific-use attribute on the <role> element (specific-use="lead", "equal", or "supporting") — see the JATS XML encoding guide for the full markup.

3. Equal contribution / co-first-author statement

“Equal” in a CRediT statement means two or more people performed the same role at the same level — it is not the same mechanism as a typographic co-first-author marker (a symbol and footnote reading something like “these authors contributed equally,” common in biomedical journals). A paper can need both, and they are not interchangeable:

Zhang San†: Conceptualization (equal), Investigation, Writing – original draft (equal).
Priya Patel†: Conceptualization (equal), Investigation, Writing – original draft (equal).

†These authors contributed equally to this work.

The CRediT “(equal)” qualifier tells a reader which roles were shared equally. The footnote is a separate, journal-specific convention about byline order and citation credit. Don’t assume one implies the other; state both if both are true.

4. Statement that also credits a non-author contributor

People who contributed but don’t meet a journal’s authorship criteria (medical writers, research assistants, core-facility staff) are not CRediT authors, but many journals still want their contribution described using the same 14 roles, placed in the acknowledgments rather than the byline. The ICMJE Recommendations require the corresponding author to get written permission before naming anyone in an acknowledgment, since acknowledgment can imply the person endorses the paper’s conclusions. The Good Publication Practice (GPP 2022) guidelines apply this specifically to professional medical writers:

Author Contributions
Zhang San: Conceptualization, Methodology.
Priya Patel: Data curation, Writing – original draft.

Acknowledgments
We thank [medical writer name], who provided writing – review & editing support funded by [sponsor], in accordance with GPP 2022 guidelines. Included with permission.

Author order is not the same thing as a CRediT statement

This is the most common mix-up in practice, and it’s worth stating plainly: a CRediT statement describes what each person did. It does not determine, and is not determined by, byline order (first author, middle authors, senior or last author) or by who qualifies as an author at all. Byline order and authorship qualification are governed separately — typically by the ICMJE authorship criteria (substantial contribution, drafting or revising, final approval, and accountability) or a journal’s own policy; see CRediT for authors for how the two relate. In practice this means reordering a CRediT statement doesn’t change the byline, and listing someone’s CRediT roles doesn’t by itself make them an author if they haven’t met the journal’s authorship bar.

CRediT author statement Elsevier: how Editorial Manager collects it

Per Elsevier’s own CRediT author statement guidance, the corresponding author selects one or more of the 14 roles for each co-author directly in the submission system (Editorial Manager), rather than typing free text. The resulting statement is typeset above the acknowledgments section of the published article. Elsevier states plainly that CRediT “in no way changes the journal’s criteria to qualify for authorship” — it’s metadata about contribution type, not a new authorship gate. Most other major publishers that collect CRediT (PLOS, Wiley, Springer Nature, Taylor and Francis, SAGE, Cambridge University Press, MDPI, Frontiers) follow the same shape: structured role selection at submission, rendered as a standard paragraph in the published version, though the exact submission-system field names and workflow step vary by publisher. Check your target journal’s current author guidelines for the specific mechanism.

In practice, the corresponding author encounters this as a role-selection form rather than a free-text box, folded into the co-author entry step of the Editorial Manager submission workflow:

1. Enter each co-author’s details (name, affiliation, email) in the author list, as with any submission.
2. For each co-author, select one or more of the 14 CRediT roles from a checklist — there is no free-text field for this step in Editorial Manager.
3. Editorial Manager assembles the selections into a formatted statement, typeset above the acknowledgments section once the article is published.

Screen layout and exact field labels can vary by journal configuration and Editorial Manager version, so treat this as the general shape of the workflow rather than a pixel-for-pixel walkthrough — follow the live prompts in your own submission, and Elsevier’s own guidance linked above, if anything here looks out of date.

Machine-readable versions, for people building the submission form

If you’re implementing CRediT capture in a submission system, repository, or CRIS rather than writing a statement by hand, don’t hand-roll the encoding. CASRAI documents two reference encodings, both aligned to the same canonical role identifiers used throughout this page:

• CRediT in JATS XML — the <role> element with a vocab-term-identifier pointing at the canonical role URI, plus the specific-use attribute for lead, equal, or supporting.
• CRediT in JSON-LD — Schema.org’s Role wrapper, for non-XML pipelines such as headless publishing systems, repositories, and discovery platforms.

Both trace back to the same authority: ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022, approved by ANSI on 14 January 2022 and published by NISO on 8 February 2022, which formalized the 14 roles CASRAI had stewarded since taking over the taxonomy’s development in 2014 (CRediT originated at a 2012 Wellcome Trust and Harvard workshop). NISO’s CRediT Standing Committee, with CASRAI participating as the taxonomy’s originating steward, now maintains the standard.

Is there a CRediT author statement generator?

Not as an interactive tool on this page yet, but you don’t need one to produce a compliant statement quickly: copy the fill-in-place template below, replace the bracketed placeholders, and delete any role a person didn’t perform.

[Author 1 name]: [role], [role].
[Author 2 name]: [role], [role].
[Author 3 name]: [role].

Choose each [role] only from the 14-role table above — a label that isn’t on that list (for example "Editing" instead of "Writing – review & editing") isn’t a valid CRediT role, and most submission systems that validate against the standard will reject it. Add a lead/equal/supporting qualifier in parentheses after a role only where it’s genuinely informative (sample 2 above), checked against the canonical 14-role index. Downloadable template formats (Word, LaTeX, Markdown, plain text) may be added to CASRAI’s author templates page over time; the fill-in-place template above works today without waiting for that. And if your target journal or repository collects CRediT as structured metadata during submission (Elsevier’s Editorial Manager, and most other major publishers) rather than free text, you’re selecting from the same 14 roles in a form instead of writing prose — this template is for the cases with no such form: preprints, theses, grant reports, and any other output where you’re assembling the statement by hand.

Frequently asked

What is a CRediT author statement?

A CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy) author statement is a structured list, attached to a published paper, that records which of the 14 standardised roles each author performed — separate from the narrative acknowledgments and separate from authorship qualification itself. For the full definition and step-by-step guidance on writing one, see CRediT for authors.

What does a CRediT author statement look like for an Elsevier submission?

The same 14-role structure used by any CRediT-adopting publisher (sample 1 above), entered as structured metadata in Elsevier’s Editorial Manager rather than free text, and typeset above the acknowledgments section of the published article. See Elsevier’s CRediT author statement page for their current instructions.

Is there a CRediT author statement generator?

Not as an interactive tool yet, but the fill-in-place template in the generator section above produces a compliant statement in under a minute by hand — no software required.

Related CASRAI resources

• CRediT for authors — the full step-by-step guide, including CRediT vs. ICMJE and AI-disclosure guidance
• The 14 CRediT roles — definitions and canonical identifiers
• CRediT in JATS XML
• CRediT in JSON-LD
• ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022
• Downloadable author templates
• AI-use disclosure guidance
• ICMJE Recommendations: Defining the Role of Authors and Contributors